Category Archives: Quaker Theology

How About This Time We NOT Be “Transformed.” For A Change.

besides being corrupted, the term is also becoming hopelessly vulgarized. When I checked “spiritual transformation” on Amazon, there were twenty screen pages devoted to it, running the gamut from Anglicanism to Zen. And not all the transformational items were books: talismans and jewelry I expected; but the transformational bath salts and roll-on deodorant were new. And how far is it from transformation oil (a bargain at $125 an ounce, with free shipping) to good old-fashioned snake oil?

Yet there’s no end: Just as I was writing this piece, a fundraising email from a venerable Quaker-founded body landed in my in-box. And sure enough, it wanted my donation to

help “young people” in Ferguson “transform educational and law enforcement systems”;
to aid unnamed others whose goal is “transforming the ways those in power relate to the communities they serve”; and
most transparent of all, to help the group in “securing the funding for our transformative programs.”
That’s three times in just over 300 words; and with only the merest hints what the first two instances mean “on the ground”; typical.

But when I ask of weighty Friends, how do I tell which “transforming” Quaker do-good program is more truly and urgently “transformative” than the other Quaker-Sponsored “transformational” efforts – the answer is evidently that those repeating the term don’t seem to care.

An Interview: Is North Carolina YM Out of the Woods? Or Not?

Q. Hmmm. So is there a bottom line here? Is NCYM “over the hump” now?

A. Well, I’m a believer in what the great prophet Yogi Berra said: “Predictions are hard, especially about the future.”
But today I’m ready to go out on a limb and say: I think it mostly is over. Or it could be.
Consider: at this point, at least six meetings have left NCYM. They include most of the most vocal pastors and others who demanded the purge. A number more may yet follow them; but each departure decreases the pressure for busting up NCYM.
If the NCYM leadership can see that this storm is well along toward clearing up, and grab the opportunity that opens up, I’m hopeful they could help change the atmosphere in the body away from, “Who do we have to get rid of to satisfy the extremists,” toward “How do we learn to follow the scriptural command to ‘bear one another’s burdens’ and act like a Christian community”?

Q. But you’re not sure about that?

A. I’m not. That’s because there’s this “Grand Plan” out there, hanging over NCYM. It’s really left over from early last summer, and was meant as one more try to please those who wanted a purge. But why the “Task Force” would still be wanting to mollify a group that has now mostly left NCYM behind is beyond me.
Yet that’s how the “Plan” reads and sounds. And if it’s pushed on the yearly meeting, NCYM could face another round of division and conflict, which would really be entirely unnecessary.

Carolina Quakers: Is The Potboiler Season Over Yet?

A few weeks ago, NCYM was boiling over with the ruckus over proposals to break up (or chop up) the body; then steaming with fury at annual sessions after three meetings were unexpectedly expelled. Followed by worry over what to do about “The Way Forward,” the plan being developed to placate the urge to purge all meetings deemed “liberal.”

But that was then. News came today that two more meetings, pillars of the militant purge-faction, have left. And it felt like no big deal. There may be more exits. That’s too bad; but something has changed: the steam is dissipating. The smoke alarm is quiet.

Part of it was how one meeting, Plainfield, did it. Long gone is the bluster of their letter of a year ago, unfurling the battle flag of the purge-the-liberals crusade: they decried “severe Theological differences, integrity, stewardship, and the lack of Christ centeredness, among some of our Meetings and among some of the leadership within NCYM.”

They vowed to withhold their Askings after April 1 of this year (tho in fact they didn’t), unless by then their demands for a purge were not “dealt with”; except they said it DEALT with, using bigger type, bold and italicized, all caps and underlined, to give it fivefold emphasis and urgency. Boiling over.

Yet their good-bye letter sounds almost like a thank you card from a polite house guest who has had a great time; not a peep about grievances. Not with a bang but a goodbye kiss.

Carolina Quakers’ “Grand Plan” II: Gotta Do Better, Friends

this “Grand Plan” ought to be an opportunity to take “steps” that put NCYM on the path of learning to live with each other, in the spirit of Galatians 6:2 (“Bear one another’s burdens, for in this you fulfill the law of Christ”) and Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares, growing together until the harvest, when the true Judge (which is NOT one of us) will make the needed reckoning (Matthew 13:24-30), instead of some narrow and divisive notions of “unity-by-exclusion and division.”

But “The Plan” is not anything like that. Not yet. So let’s send it back to the drawing board and come up with some new “steps” that will begin to really take us “forward”, rather than backward into another round of fruitless wrangling over tired and pointless disputes.

Otherwise, we’ll just be fulfilling (again) Paul’s prediction in Galatians 5:15: “If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.”

Friends can do better in North Carolina. It’s time.

Carolina Quakers & “The Way Forward” — Or Is It The Way Backward?

And here’s a suggestion to meetings: when this Plan comes up, how about you start by asking thyselves: do we really want to do this? Or are there more urgent and constructive priorities for our meeting and NCYM?

Because if many others are as tired of this kind of thing as I am, maybe that’s feedback the Task Force needs to hear, and soon. As my early Clearness Committee, The Supremes, put it so well in 1965: “STOP! In The Name Of Love!”

My own uneasiness deepens when moving from the first four “Steps” in “The Plan” (we’ll come back to them) to the “Recommended Way Forward” section. That’s the “action part,” and the more times I read it, the more uneasy I get.

The fact is, Friends, it doesn’t sound like a “request” for input into a collective, transparent, open-to-the-spirit discernment process.

Not at all. Which sets off the alarms and raises the warning flags.

For one thing, look at this instruction:

“This request shall be considered by all monthly meetings and a copy of the approved minute related to this request submitted to the Yearly Meeting office by December 1, 2015 for review by the Task Force.”

The paper says “request,” but I grew up in a military family. I know an order when I read it. I also did pretty well in English class. And I know that “Shall” used in the third person connotes an order, a requirement or an obligation. I got it.